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Artist:   Chapel Club
Title:    Palace
Label:    Polydor
Genre:    Rock
Bitrate:  200kbit av.
Time:     00:44:29
Size:     68.30 mb
Rip Date: 2011-01-29
Str Date: 2011-01-31

01. Depths                                                        1:46
02. Surfacing                                                     3:42
03. Five Trees                                                    3:51
04. After The Flood                                               3:39
05. White Knight Position                                         3:08
06. The Shore                                                     6:03
07. Blind                                                         4:16
08. Fine Light                                                    5:14
09. O Maybe I                                                     3:30
10. All The Eastern Girls                                         4:36
11. Paper Thin                                                    4:44

Release Notes:

Chapel Club may have named themselves after not one but two venues of
weekend worship, but, on this evidence, we'd be inclined to suspect
that their god is neither a DJ nor one of a more Cliff-friendly
variety. Instead, they've chosen to prostrate themselves at the temple
of pretty much the entire pantheon of bleak'n'blank boys from the
entirety of the age of indie, from the Bunnymen and Joy Division right
through to Glasvegas and White Lies. All well and good, you might think
– or, more appropriately, all sick and tainted – but what's to stop
this being a parade of numbness-by-numbers?

Quite a variety of things, as it happens. First up, there hasn't been a
debut album more giggishly constructed than this since Foals'
Antidotes: launching with the tantalisingly fades-in-slowly organ
promises of Depths, it starts laying its stall out rather tentatively
via Surfacing, which, even after all this time (its initial release was
as their first single back in late 2009), is still somewhat weighed
down by its over-appropriation of Dream a Little Dream of Me in spite
of a certain candid cuteness, before working its way to a mid-point
plateau that it stomps mercurially across thereafter. Moreover, there's
enough creative shading here to ensure that moribundity never sets in –
vocally, Lewis Bowman has a masterful knack of being a bruiser one bar
and bruised the next, while, lyrically, there's an abject refinement to
his lyrics that manifests itself in titles such as White Knight
Position and O Maybe I and ruminations on love and loss that tower over
mere landfill cliché.

Musically, too, when they deign to stretch out and wait, to borrow a
phrase from one of their most frequent touchstones, they're capable of
a preciously pretty haziness that sparkles darkly and startles
artfully. Fine Light is a particularly pronounced example of this, all
hushed guitar cascades, fracturing-into-focus shoegazing and
sighs-as-instruments drawing the listener swooningly in before abruptly
changing pace for a breakneck display of soaring skew-pop. Paper Thin,
their one actual musing on religion proper, reclines into a hymnal
minimalism amid twangs that seem to summon up a Hawley-ian heartbreak,
and last year's standout single The Shore has lost none of its pathos
and potency in the meantime, its slow sculpting and funereally reverent
drumming chiming against a blanket of resigned Cocteau Twins reverb and
some thoroughly luminous bile to produce effortlessly epic results.

Alright, so they might be inserting themselves into a canon known for
its critical consensus, but Palace is still a vital addition to the
oeuvre, and richly deserving of the inevitable praise.